“Disobedience is the transversal of mirages,
a manner of lightheartedly breaking bonds,
because one has agreed to lose everything, including life.”

– Anne Dufourmantelle, In Praise of Risk (2011)

In the darkroom, Mexican artist Fabiola Menchelli (born 1983) transforms light from source to raw material. Working in complete darkness without the aid of a “safelight,” she folds, unfolds, exposes, develops, and sometimes solarizes vivid, abstract color photograms. There is no camera and there are no negatives. Rather, she relies upon touch, sound, and color theory to make each work with the movements of her own body. There is also physical risk: working with color in the darkroom is demanding and unforgiving, requiring special safety gear and a reorientation of the body and mind. The results are atmospheric and ethereal, liquid and often unmeasured. They are at once photographs, paintings, and sculptures—and the process of making is recorded directly onto the surface of the paper.

Considering Menchelli works blindly, encounters with risk, chance, and error are central to her practice. Historically, the photographic medium has been both praised and constrained by its capacity for technical precision: framing, composition, focus, defined light and shadow, all further calibrated in darkroom processing. Menchelli’s photograms push against this tradition, requiring a physical presence and exchange between her body and the photographic paper that goes beyond the two-dimensional frame. Rather than operate a camera to capture the world, she enacts disobedience, to allow for other ways of understanding existence from feminist perspectives. She trusts her own intuition and muscle memory, embracing uncertainty as a radical act of unlearning.

The Norton is honored to welcome Menchelli as our 2024-25 Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence. certain silence marks her first solo museum exhibition.

All works courtesy of the artist, Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo, and Marshall Gallery, unless otherwise noted.

Lauren Richman, Ph.D.
William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography
Organized by the Norton Museum of Art. Support for this exhibition was provided by the William and Sarah Ross Soter Photography Fund.

Thank you to Lauren Richman for her incredible kindness, trust, and support in making this show. Thank you to Rachel Gustafson, Pam Parry, Victoria Pesta, Sarah Bass, Carlos R. Faure Maurás, Ashley Kerr, Scott Simmons, Erin Ammon, Arthur Salazar, Lorraine Bond, Glenn Tomlinson, and everyone at the Norton Museum of Art. Thank you to my team at FocoLab. My deepest gratitude to Priscila Vanneuville, Laura Orozco, Beatriz Diaz, Miguel Angel Ortega, Melvin Lara, Leslie Moody-Castro, Andrea Manuel, Andrea Martinez, Andrea Chapela, Jess Perlitz, Bean Gilsdorf, Artemio, Douglas Marshall, and Gustavo Arróniz. To Blaz and all my family with love.

Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach
6 a 8 de diciembre, 2024

Arróniz
Booth C44 con NIEVESFERNÁNDEZ and Nueveochenta

Chiharu Shiota, José Vera Matos, Rafael Grassi, Jordi Alcaraz, Fabiola Menchelli, Fernando Uhía, Lester Rodríguez y Moris

Marshall Gallery
Booth B35

Chris McCaw, Fabiola Menchelli, Albarran Cabrera, Rodrigo Valenzuela y Natalia Sanchez

TM · PARIS PHOTO 2024

Alexander Apóstol, Iñaki Bonillas, Miguel G. Counahan, Pilar Goutas, Fabiola Menchelli, Eric Taubman & Portfolio selection

Paris Photo 2024
TM, Voices Sector, Booth V03
Grand Palais, Paris
7-10th of November

Arroniz Arte Contemporáneo, CDMX
Opens Thursday Sep. 19th, 18 – 21 hr.
Sep 18 to Oct 30, 2024

Less a site or location and more an ambient, the chromosphere refers to the second layer of the sun’s atmosphere, and the most visible during a complete solar eclipse, when the moon’s positioning allows us to verify its distant existences, as a circle of active, explosive tendrils, a ring around the circular absence of the sun, in tones from red to blue and purple. The term is now borrowed briefly as the title for the exhibition of new work by Mexico City-based experimental photographer Fabiola Menchelli and Brooklyn-based painter Dannielle Tegeder.

We are pleased to invite you to the book launch of : & , which will be presented by Stephanie Snyder, curator and director of the Douglas F. Cooley Gallery, and Fabiola Menchelli.

Snyder and Menchelli will discuss the exhibition Dark Moves, which took place in Portland, Oregon; their working process, the collaboration with the talented artist Heather Walkins and the beautiful publication designed by Priscilla Vanneuville, which they will share with the public that day. We will also have a special music performance by Jonathan Snyder playing for the first time in México City.

The event will take place on March 12th at 19:00 h. at Angstroms, Aguascalientes 112, Colonia Roma Sur in Mexico City, as part of the closing of Fabiola Menchelli’s exhibition . The last day to visit the exhibition will be March 15, 2024.

We look forward to seeing you there.

We are not what we have seen
by Fabiola Menchelli
curated by Laura Orozco
5 Feb. – 10 Mar. 2024
Opening February 6, 2024

Arróniz at Angstroms
Aguascalientes 112, Colonia Roma CDMX
(Entrance through the public parking lot)

The exhibition We are not what we have seen by Fabiola Menchelli shows -for the first time in Mexico- a series of works that expand the corporeality of the photographic through a feminist gaze. The photograms present transcend the two-dimensionality of the medium, absorbing the sculptural. This unfolding generates a space that favors the production of new and parallel historical, procedural and formal narratives. – Laura Orozco

Nicole Oppenheimer (Círculo ‘21) Posición para un pequeño desvío

Bucareli 108, interior 107, Centro, CDMX
JAN. 27 – FEB. 24, 2024

Opening: Jan. 27, 13:00 – 18:00 h.

LTRL is pleased to present Circular el Tiempo, curated by Fabiola Menchelli. The exhibition arises from the project Círculo de Crítica de Obra and presents the work of 14 Latin American artists. The works gravitate around the idea of circularity, a polyphonic word that unfolds, expanding the reciprocity and sense of community generated by the Circle. The artists in the exhibition explore circularity as gesture, as verb, as process, as path, as social action, in relation to time, repetition, matter and image. They invite us to rethink circularity as an axis for reimagining and inhabiting new possible futures.

El Círculo de Crítica de Obra is a workshop for emerging Latin American artists. A horizontal space designed to advise the creative processes of the participants and to expand artistic research through accompaniment and group critique.

 
ARTISTS
 
Alejandro Palomino
Andrea Bores
Andrea Martinez
Antonia Alarcon
Carmen Vela
Claudia Luna
Fernanda Contreras
Jorge Rosano
Manuel la Rosa
Nicole Oppenheimer
Pancho Westerdam
Silvestre Borgatello
Sofia Peypoch
Ximena Pereyra
 

Curated by Fabiola Menchelli

Thursday, February 16, 2023, 10:00 AM – Sunday, July 02, 2023, 5:00 PM
Featured Exhibitions Gallery, Henry Radford Hope Wing, First Floor
Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

How does one experience a photograph that appears “unphotographic”? Focusing on the material and tactile properties of the medium, Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now is the first contemporary survey to examine cameraless photography across generations, cultures, and ideologies. Referred to as photograms or contact prints, cameraless photographs are made using analogue photography’s foundational elements: light, chemistry, and light-sensitive surfaces.

Presenting recent work by over 40 artists–including Yto Barrada, Iñaki Bonillas, Ellen Carey, Hernease Davis, Sheree Hovsepian, Roberto Huarcaya, Kei Ito, Dakota Mace, Fabiola Menchelli, Lisa Oppenheim, Daisuke Yokota, among many others–Direct Contact highlights many emerging global artists and features primarily women-identifying artists. Unfolding across five sections–Age, Scale, Form, Texture, and Value–Direct Contact positions cameraless photography as both an intellectual cornerstone in the medium’s history and an enduring and important force within contemporary art.

The exhibition is curated by Lauren Richman, Assistant Curator of Photography.

The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, is proud to present Dark Moves: Fabiola Menchelli & Heather Watkins. This intimate exhibition consists of newly-commissioned work by Mexico City artist Fabiola Menchelli and Northwest artist Heather Watkins.

Saturday, February 25 at 2:00 pm, Reed Chapel, Eliot Hall
Conversation with artists Fabiola Menchelli and Heather Watkins, and exhibition curator Stephanie Snyder, followed by a public reception at the Cooley.

On view February 16—May 14
The Cooley is open to the public Thursday—Sunday, 12:00 to 5:00 pm.
Nestled in the Reed College library, it is always free. Families are welcome!

Menchelli and Watkins are artists deeply invested in the sensory and perceptual possibilities of light—along with its orbital complements, darkness and shadow. With artistic methodologies drawn from poetry, cosmogony, and scientific experimentation, the artists modulate the luminal in pursuit of unknown outcomes. Resultant forms of disappearance, reversal, and refraction communicate across the entirety of the Cooley—particularly in the center, where a hexagonal room with open ends echoes the internal angles and shadows of Menchelli and Watkins’ work.​​ As viewers move through, and around, the hexagon, their bodies draw the symbol of the lemniscate—the infinity symbol (∞). Dark Moves seeks to emulate the ways that shadow becomes a medium in the artists’ hands—contouring, obscuring, and unfolding their work across the deep, azure walls of the museum.

Menchelli and Watkins employ color, line, and saturation—dematerializing modernist geometries, and transforming planarity into ascending angles and curves. Their experiments produce enigmatic effects and lacunae—voids and folds that touch and trace one another. In Dark Moves, Menchelli brings new dimensionality to her translucent color photograms, made entirely in the dark—folding and manipulating the photosensitive paper. These alchemical agents become embodied sculptures mounted on a stainless steel substructure that thrust their geometric volumes, casting shadows on the wall. In the darkened surroundings of the space, Watkins transforms the dynamic linearity of her ink-based drawings into rising, swooping organic forms that radiate wild shadows. These sculptural forms accompany numinous gold reliefs created by imperceptible forces, and small works on paper that oscillate between a fluid lyricism and darker visions of interior compression.

Over the last two years, the artists and the curator have engaged in an extensive collaborative process, working between Portland and Mexico City. This ongoing conversation has shaped every aspect of the exhibition and its extended programing, including the forthcoming catalog by Mexico City designer Priscila Vanneuville.

In Dark Moves, seeing is not believing. Here, to “see” is to search for ways of knowing that may only be accessed through shadow, the subconscious, and the ancient iconographies of pleasure and pain at the heart of the visual imagination.

More information

Velar a Verde (Through the Green Veil), 2023
Fabiola Menchelli

Material Art Fair, Vol. 9
PROXYCO Gallery, Stand A18
Expo Reforma, CDMX
February 9th–12th, 2023

Through the Green Veil is an installation by Fabiola Menchelli that distances itself from the conventions of the photographic apparatus to expand its languages ​​and functions. The pieces—configured from the folds of the photographic paper itself—lose their “optimal” and impeccable character to take a three-dimensional form. This action proposes a break with the hegemonies of photography: it includes the error as a tool to question the interstices of the image. The work replicates one act—the fold—but in its repetition the gesture is resignified in a space open for negotiation between support, color, light and architecture.

Between the soft gradients appears a curtain framed by the saturation of magenta, a pigment present in the pieces thanks to its opposite: a green filter. The exploration of the limits of hot pink takes an impetuous place that overflows from the art object to the entire space, and directs the viewer’s gaze towards the whites, to the lack of time and content in the image. The white cube refers to that absence present that privileges and sustains the work in question. This tension between pigment, spatiality and gaze is a conscious wink to the actions and prejudices associated with femininity, valid as a female artist. Menchelli subverts the function of the magenta color under a character of accumulation and occupation, and leaves any previous association suspended. The artist leads us towards that middle space between the work and what surrounds it. There is a loss of absolutes that allows us to look at interiority from exteriority and vice versa. The installation becomes a liminal space, a prelude to what is to come.

Laura Orozco